Motor vehicles are integral to the spectacle of the Tour de France. Richard
Lofthouse reports.

Forget the more familiar “war on Britain’s roads” idea of cyclists and car drivers. The 100th edition of the Tour de France celebrates two wheels and four side by side.

In 1904, Le Tour nearly expired when half the riders were disqualified for taking illegal lifts or hopping on trains. Since then, ironically, the race only flourished because of cars and motorcycles, for how else were the cameramen and scribblers to convey the glamour and the magic to the expectant masses in tomorrow’s newspaper?

If you’ve ever waited on a French roadside for the peloton, you know better than anyone that the cycling is merely the pretext, almost an excuse, for a Gallic pageant powered by the internal combustion engine.

First come peacock-like gendarmes on motorbikes, then the caravane publicitaire, where 200 fruit and pretzel-shaped vehicles populated by professional dancers shower the crowds with tat. Then come the furrow-browed team car drivers and newsmen, and only finally, after an expectant gap of mounting tension heralded by the spine-tingling clatter of media helicopters, the riders.

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Ah, the riders. Gone in the blink of an eye, they’re followed by another procession of cars bristling with spare bikes and wheels.

The mingling of two wheels and four is intrinsic to the glamour of the Tour, whether it’s a rider trying to “get back on” (regain the sanctuary of the peloton after a fall or mechanical mishap) by darting between the slipstreams of support vehicles, or clinging on to a door mirror while the mechanic tweaks the bike, all conducted at unimaginable speed.

If surviving one Tour reduces the life expectancy of a rider by a year (this is fiction, but suggestive of the harshness of the race), it simply kills cars. Clutches burn, tyres wear bald, gearboxes break. The rule of thumb is three years’ wear for a three-week Grand Tour.

Skoda, which like Peugeot started life as a cycle manufacturer (to say nothing of the keen cycling abilities of Henry Ford, William Morris and Louis Chevrolet), has capitalised on the claimed strength of its cars, supporting the toughest sporting event on Earth. It is also the biggest car sponsor of pro-cycling, with the commissaire, or race judge, always present in a bright red Skoda Octavia.

And then there’s what isn’t caught on camera. Stage nine of this year’s Giro d’Italia led to the following media briefing: “Race organisers reported 'a crash without consequences’ involving team cars and Orica-GreenEDGE’s Jens Keukeleire 154km into the stage.” I wonder whether Jens would agree.

Then, there’s my childhood memory of descending an alpine col in the family Renault 21, to be expertly overtaken by two guys on racing bikes, never to be seen again. “But Dad,” I said, “we’re in a car.”

At Le Tour, this translates into extreme driving to merely stay ahead of riders on a descent, not for fun but as an imperative.

Cresting a summit in a support car, the race radio screams, “Cars that are at the front get out of the way…!” The riders do up to 90kph (getting on for 60mph), so the cars have to do 100kph, but they can’t turn corners like bikes. With Paul Belmondo a guest passenger, just returned from competing in Le Mans, writer Paul Fournel recalls, the driver “added a touch of audacity in the hope of obtaining, once and for all, his licence to drive too fast and too well”. By the last hairpin bend, everyone was simply glad to be alive.

If that sounds heroic, consider the skillset of the riders. American ex-pro Joe Parkin remembers grabbing an illicit tow from a blue, Gendarme-driven Renault, having bribed the driver with a pair of sunglasses. His French team-mate gripped the other door-post and the gendarme accelerated to 90kph. Riding one-handed at that speed? Not one to try at home. But it didn’t work out for his team-mate. “Less than 2km into our tow, I heard the unmistakable sound of a bike and its rider sliding across the pavement. The cop behind the wheel lifted off the gas for just a moment, and then put the hammer back down. The one on the passenger side looked at me and shrugged. I didn’t say a word.”

Jeopardy is the rule, not the exception. On stage nine of the 2011 Tour a Citroën C5 estate belonging to a French television channel swerve into a group of riders doing 60kph (37mph), tossing rider Johnny Hoogerland into a barbed wire fence. The driver was banned the next day.

But this is nothing compared with the driving antics of cycling pros when they get behind the wheel, often ending in farce or tragedy. There is a notorious photo of the late Marco Pantani, the Italian superstar of the mountain stages who died from a drugs overdose in 2004, shaking hands with an Italian cop having just mounted a parked Peugeot 405 in his Mercedes ML after driving the wrong way up a one-way street in Cesena. The bang was so loud that pedestrians threw themselves to floor thinking a bomb had detonated.

The history of pro-cycling is littered with such narratives, perhaps reflecting a disdain for risk born of the inevitability of crashing.

Whatever the reasons, cyclists are just as likely to be petrolheads as petrolheads cyclists. Sir Chris Hoy, now embarking on his first season of motor racing, is but one example featured in these pages recently.

Cars remain a major topic of conversation among the pro-peloton, just as cycling has caught on among F1 drivers ranging from Jenson Button to Mark Webber. Former champion Alain Prost, too, is an adept pedaller. Audis and Pinarellos are in demand in both directions.

It’s not true that these groups are breeds apart. It’s a modern myth that they ever were in the first place.